How to get the features that you want on a budget!

When you see all the amazing options that paid plan offers I often just get a little bit discouraged. I don’t have that kind of budget to work with at the moment. I used to feel that without it I could never beat the competition.

How will my blog get noticed if all the others have these amazing features that I don’t have access to.

But nothing can be solved with some ingenuity and research.

So I found some ways work around paid plans until I can afford them.

Canva vs free templates

You know Canva for work? The one where you can keep templates and such so you need less time for editing. To me this sounded amazing. Right now my graphics are all over the place. But I hope to change it.

Recently I came across a similar program that will let you save templates for free.

This site befunky.com has more options than I have seen before in the free options.

I love the amount of options that come with a free account. Aside from having the amazing template option you can also upload fonts and use your own photos.

Want to know how to make your own template? Marianne from designyourownblog.com has  a very beautiful tutorial on that  It was also on her  blog that I found this wonderful website so I hope you check her out!

Buffer and HootSuite

Both Buffer and Hootsuite have a free option and this is absolutely great. Unfortunately, both only let you schedule up to 10 posts in the queue.

Personally, I’m not always that great at filling queues. More importantly, 10 is a very low number if you need to both schedule your blog post promotion and share more valuable content.

So I figured out a way around that. First you are going to need an account for both.

You can use both at the same time! I used HootSuite for long-term scheduling for my blog posts and such and I use Buffer as a queue to keep tweeting all the time.

And this holiday, when I take two week of I, can still schedule 20 tweets to cover that time.

I would love to have an actual plan in the future so I can schedule without a limit but for now, this will work fine.

Curious which other futures I use at the moment? My 3 favourite blogging tools at the moment.

Free trials like board booster

Looking for a great way to boost your Pinterest a little, but not enough money to pay for a scheduler? Go for the free trial on board booster. You can schedule 100 pins for free. This way you can just check which kind of schedules work.

Also, you get a peek at how everything works and the amount of things they offer.

Most scheduling apps have a trail like this and not only can you use them to find out which schedules work best you can also see which scheduling tools work best for when you do have the tools.

With what I have seen Boardbooster is a great tool and I would love to have the paid version someday.

All over the internet, there are alternatives for problems we have. Instead of going for the most popular option I think it is important to do research and look at what fits you best. The same goes for example for hosts and the like.

Your blog should fit you and the tools you use for that should be just as fitting to you and your budget, remember to always use a budget app to keep track of where you’re spending your money!

Personally, I would love to have the paid version for a lot of things. But it simply isn’t an option at the moment. When it does become an option though I’m still sure I wouldn’t want to pay for everything. Solutions like befunky.com are amazing and I fell in love with this programme all the way.

Let me know if there are any paid futures you want that you can’t afford right now. I would love to find more alternatives for problems like this.

Also, if you have any free options/solutions everybody would love to hear about it in the comments!